Rocky Mountain Club B5

The pricing along with the very subtle styling will make it a really hard sell. It will probably suffer the same fate as the B5.5 W8. VW could at least draw more styling cues from the R-GT concept they showed at SEMA.

The BMW 3-series is sportier and has more prestige for the same kind of money -- even the restyled 2007 Infiniti G35 is a relative bargain compared to it. The curb weight on the R36 would limit it's performance greatly.Personally I'd rather take a fully loaded A3 V6 DSG.

I took this from the article....where does it say they are NOT bringing it to the US?

For the German market which only gets the 250hp 3.2l VR6 version of the Passat, this is a significant increase in power. However the U.S. market already gets the 3.6l with 280hp, so the additional 20hp in the R36 while nice, is much less of a bump. Volkswagen claims the R36 scoots from 0-62 mph in 5.6 seconds which is fairly decent for the portly all-wheel-drive sedan.

The pricing along with the very subtle styling will make it a really hard sell. It will probably suffer the same fate as the B5.5 W8. VW could at least draw more styling cues from the R-GT concept they showed at SEMA.

The BMW 3-series is sportier and has more prestige for the same kind of money -- even the restyled 2007 Infiniti G35 is a relative bargain compared to it. The curb weight on the R36 would limit it's performance greatly.Personally I'd rather take a fully loaded A3 V6 DSG.

The turned aluminum interior trim looks really nice.

Right. But IIRC, they made the same arguments about the R32. And look at how "well" that car has done, especially with enthusiasts. There's just something "different" about VW's R cars. Not sure what it is, but it's enough for me to take one over a straight HP/Features comparison to another brand. Besides, there's always the L337 factor in that it's not just another bimmer or Audi. In any case, I'll bet just like the R32, this cars just feels different...